10-11August Departing.

After our evening with Manus the girls spent the morning showering and cleaning, I put some laundry in the machine, up at the showers, and porridge and toast was had for breakfast. Manus joined with his bags and shortly it was time to go for a final coffee before the bus to the airport for those leaving. I thought I’d seen a sign for Lidl’s on the way to the bus stop and  we returned to the boat for some faffing before deciding to go to the maritime museum. The museum consisted of several ex naval exhibits, primarily a destroyer from 1957 which was fascinating and took a fair time to go around, there was also a submarine which was in far better condition than the one I’d seen in Aalborg with a different torpedo loading system with the spare torpedoes in a sort of magazine behind the tubes which could be rotated  so that they could be slid into the tubes.  From here we went back to the boat and did a Lidl shop, this time I missed the sign but we found it anyway, buying an extra box of 12 eggs along with various other bits and pieces. Unfortunately 4 of the eggs didn’t survive the journey home making a mess in both the bottom of the bag and on the cabin sole.Having sorted out the mess below the egg box was wet with broken eggs so, with the remaining eggs in it I put it in the cockpit to dry so as to avoid finding eggs glued to the box in the later on. This was not a good plan. Later when I went up to get them either they had blown off the side of the cockpit or a gull had knocked them off and several more breakages had occurred  causing more clearing up to be needed.

Later we thought we’d go for a pint and headed towards the pub we’d had dinner at the night before,  on the way we passed the Kronhus - the oldest building known in Gothenburg which had been built as an ammunition store in the1700s and now housed artisanal gift shops. We saw the outside but it was closed being a Sunday. The pub was also closed however, pressing on we managed to find an open one and had a couple of pints before trying to go for a Kebab but finding the shop Manus had used before closed  ended up at an Indian restaurant with a gay indian waiter whose recommendations were excellent, I had number 84 and Manus had number 35, both spicy chicken dishes, his red mine beige along with rice and Naan bread. From here we managed to find another place selling beer and thought we should support the local enterprise so spent a couple of hours doing this and chatting to the barman.

This morning from about 0800 I tried ‘phoning various telephone numbers to try to find out how to clear out. Initially the police told us we didn’t have to but  I didn’t believe them, they gave me the Customs number who said we didn’t need to either.  We’d previously asked the harbour master who didn’t know. Eventually after much googling and consternation one number we dialled, after a couple of transfers, got us through to someone who knew what we were talking about and we arranged to meet at the border force harbour at 1300. We pottered about putting the anchor away and tidying up a bit before planning the departure which involved a couple of ropes, one to the bow from the pontoon beside us for Manus to pull to keep the bow from clattering the boat on our starboard, downwind side and one from the starboard side to the pontoon on the starboard side to encourage us to turn to port once out of the berth. There was a nice boat beside us with it’s dinghy tied up astern and we asked them to move this which they did and then we let go. Initially Manus underestimated the force he needed to pull the bow into the wind but then, with some encouragement,  got the hang of it, I selected backwards, instead of forwards which hadn’t worked so well and we, with a strong wind on the port beam, pulled out astern, the bow now came nicely to port but the stern just headed towards the Hallberg Rassey astern of us instead of blowing down wind as expected, the line on the starboard side had been put out  for just this eventuality and I took some strain on it and this pulled the stern nicely to starboard and soon we were free of the tight space and heading down river towards the Border force harbour. We arrived and were looking for likely berths with a Pilot boat coming in and telling us we shouldn’t be there. We ignored him and berthed anyway on a handy floating empty dock and a nice lady came to see what we were doing. We explained that we had an appointment and she was happy with that saying we needed to stay on the boat as it was also a military harbour. Manus made some sandwiches  and then the border force turned up and we accompanied them to their van which had a little office in the back of it. I told them how difficult it had been to find their number and they said they’d look into it although I’m not sure how if they really understood what I meant. We had our passports checked out of the country and were soon back on the boat. Apparently truckers often neglect to be stamped out of Schengen and end up being barred because of the 90 day rule.We had our sandwiches, followed by tea and then left and had a couple of hours motoring to the anchorage I’d chosen which turned out to be a rotten choice having a narrow passage into it once we’d dropped anchor couldn’t get it to set, probably it was a rocky bottom. An hour or so later we were at anchor off Ockero island with a clay seabed and are hoping to be under way in the morning.